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The second image shows the things you only see in the slow motion replay. It’s a frame from the moment of ignition. Next time I won’t be putting the expensive HD camera there!

I just did test firing number 15 of the mini MHD generator. This thing is really starting to work. The out put on test 15 was 50% higher than 14 and 14 was pretty good. This was another big change in the electrodes. Same shape as in test 14 but with a lot more surface area.

I’m going to try and get another run in tonight. Check back in about an hour to see how it went.

Our other company Sand Brick Technologies got a great article at GizMag blog.

Sandbag 2.0 – meet the Sand Brick

Sell sandbags,  build spaceships.

Drew spent the all day Saturday decking out the interior of the crew module mock up. He made great progress on the lighting and the monitor placement. We’re experimenting with “wrap around” monitors on the interior.  The idea is to give you complete panorama view without the heavy windows. Each monitor can also be re-tasked for any of dozens of exterior cameras.  We do still intend to have two  small windows for a reality check.

We fired test 14 of the Mini MHD generator yesterday. The results have back and forth but this one was a solid leap ahead. It shows a 30% increase in base voltage over test 13.

The Electrodes

We’re started making the new landing gear for the chase plane.

See: https://jpaerospace.com/new_wordpress/?p=1581

The gear is a laminated and tapered maple bar (the wood not the donut).  Making it is the easy part, the install will be tricky. We may need to pull the engine and flip the fuselage over.

From last nights test number 13.

Saturday I attended a workshop for NASA’s newest prize competition, the NanoSat launcher Challenge.  The two million dollar prize is for the first to haul a one Kilo satellite to orbit twice in a week.

Team Phoenicia, a Google X-Prize team hosted the workshop. It was amazing to see the NASA guy in charge of the thing and the AST guy in charge of the launch license in the same room. It was a good start to the competition. I don’t know if we’re going to take a run at it, but we’re looking at it pretty hard.

This 6000 foot vehicle is many years down the road, however it’s always good to keep your eye on the ball.

We’ve completed MHD Generator firings 10 , 11 and 12. Before we fire we’ll  run a volt through the entire system as a control. There obviously was a short somewhere. I spent 40 minutes in violation of my own rule of troubleshooting. Always check power first. The battery I was using as a voltage source was dead out of the package. However in the all the troubleshooting we discover a channel dead on the A/D converter on the data logger.

After all that test run 10 was still a bust. We ran test 11 old school. Straight on a meter. That showed us what was wrong. Today with the fix in place we fired test 12 with great results.  We’re going to fired it again in the same configuration to verify the results. Then we’re moving to the next electrode upgrade and we start all over again.

From test 11